


found

by lesbianmcqueen



Category: Garfield - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, just one big happy immortal family, liz is a vampire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:15:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27223339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianmcqueen/pseuds/lesbianmcqueen
Summary: She’d never actually met anyone like her before. Eldritch. Unprecedented.“Something more,” said the cat.Jon gave her a lopsided grin. “Something bigger, if you will.”
Relationships: Jon Arbuckle/Liz Wilson
Comments: 9
Kudos: 24





	found

“Did it scar?”

“It shouldn’t have.”

“But did it?”

She shrugs.

“Show me,” he pleads.

Already, it’s December again. As she tilts her neck to the side, the old radiator hums louder and louder. Its screaming heat does nothing to excise the cold from his stomach: He was lying when he told her he wasn’t afraid. But the scars themselves are not frightening. They are simple, clean, as precise as if she had been the one to pierce her own skin, with a disinfected syringe and a chaste puncture. He can almost see it: The delicate coaxing of the blood from her veins, the swift swab of alcohol across the little wound. It is not unfamiliar after all. How can it be, on such a familiar person, in such familiar light?

Jon stares, mesmerized, and runs his thumb gently over the two raised dots. “What do you mean, it shouldn’t have scarred? It does in all the movies.”

“Too shallow,” says Liz. “Too small.”

He furrows his brow, thinking hard.

“There’s no scientific explanation,” she says. “At least, not that I know of. But there’s also no scientific explanation for…” She doesn’t meet his eye as she gestures to her neck. “… _this_.”

“Vampireness,” he says sagely.

“Vampirism, I think, is the term.”

“Are you trying to cure it?”

“No,” she says. “No, I like the perks. Don’t you?”

Jon shrugs. “Immortality gets boring. Especially after the first two hundred years.”

“ _So_ boring,” yawns a voice.

That would be the cat, at the floor of the radiator. He stretches out his paws and yawns once more before rolling in one smooth, languid motion onto his back.

Liz leans over the side of the couch to peer at him. “How long have _you_ been immortal, Garfield?”

“I precede the beginning,” he says, sharp teeth glinting in the golden hour sun as it reflects off the snow, and briefly Liz is filled with a certain, singular fear. But the moment passes.

“And Odie?”

At the sound of his name, Odie comes bounding in from the kitchen, tongue out, bell ringing. He jumps onto her lap and she laughs, scratches him behind the ears while Jon tries to remember. Garfield ends up speaking for him, inasmuch as he can speak. His mode of communication is a little more akin to telepathy, though he disagrees with the term, claiming that “real” telepathy gives him a migraine. “Thousand B.C.E., give or take.”

Liz kisses the dog on the nose. “He looks good for his age.”

“Don’t we all?”

Liz settles back against the couch, stroking Odie’s back, solemn in thought. Jon watches her intently, face flushed with admiration, while the cat settles back into his nap.

“Is it coincidence?” she asks finally.

Garfield opens one lazy eye.

She clarifies. “That we found each other.”

“You live long enough,” he says, “You find who you’re supposed to find.”

* * *

Every eighteen years or so, right around the time the nurses start asking her if she does Botox, Liz dutifully erases the memories of her clients and coworkers. Nothing fancy, just a little hypnotizing and a small pink vial. She then takes a short sabbatical on long-earned savings and reapplies to the hospital when she gets bored, invariably getting rehired, invariably befriending the same coworkers and the same clients. This has been her routine since the 1940s, when she was bitten by a labaratory bat while working for the U.S. Army’s bioengineering department.

But in the mid-eighties, when she was looking through her files gearing up to do the mind-wipe for the third time, Liz realized that something was off about one of her patients.

Strike that. She’d realized something was off about this patient by the second check-up. But she’d ignored it, because—

Because? She was a woman of science and the science had never added up. This was a cat who binge-atelasagna. And doughnuts. And pizza. And cookies. And _coffee—_ the cat was addicted to coffee. He consumed more sugar and oil and salt and caffeine than any cat, or even a small human, should be able to consume. And his weight showed that, but not his vitals. So why hadn’t she questioned it?

  
“Easy,” said Garfield, when she’d forced Jon to bring him in for a check-up and demanded an answer—from Jon, though she was not surprised so much as vindicated when it was Garfield who responded. “I’m not a cat.”

“What are you, then?”

Garfield shrugged. _Cats can’t shrug,_ thought Liz giddily. More evidence for the hypothesis he was recommending to her, the hypothesis she should have formulated years ago. She’d read about werewolves, fairies, selkies, djinn. She’d found potion recipes at antique stores that were authored by witches and she had healed the previously unhealable. But she’d never actually _met_ anyone like her before. Eldritch. Unprecedented.

“Something more,” said the cat.

Jon gave her a lopsided grin. “Something _bigger,_ if you will.”

Garfield stood upright— _stood upright!_ —and scratched Jon’s shoulder through his shirt. He yelped.

“And what about you?”

Jon winced, clutched tightly at his shoulder. “I was cursed in—ow—in the fourteenth century.”

She handed him an alcohol swab, unmoved. “Hit on a girl one too many times?”

“Tripped into a witch’s gardenias.”

Liz glanced toward the drawer where the little pink vial was waiting. Then she turned back to Jon, and to Garfield. “Would you like to come over for dinner sometime?”

* * *

That was thirty years ago. Not too much has changed since then. She’s started taking antihistamines. Fallen in love. Become addicted to coffee. Maybe her world’s a little warmer, brighter. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that she should be pushing a hundred, that Jon should nothing but bones. That Odie should be dust and rock and Garfield should be—astral, atmospheric.

Sometimes it’s hard to forget.

“ _You_ were supposed to find _us_?” she asks dubiously. “Two humans and a dog in The Middle of Nowhere, Midwest America?”

“Mind-Numbing Suburbia. But the cat makes four. A nuclear family.”

“You’re not a cat,” says Liz.

“I’m whatever I want to be.”

She sits up, jostling Odie, ready to argue—but then Garfield stretches out a paw, battering a sea of dust mites in the shaft of sunlight he’s been following all afternoon, and Liz is suddenly awash with an absolute and inexplicable peace.

She falls back onto the couch, right against Jon’s side. Odie curls up in her lap, eyes closed, tail thumping. Garfield meets her gaze and holds it, and that fear strikes her again, right in the middle of her peace, hard and cold as the tip of a needle through blood-warm flesh. A healthy fear. Inevitable. At any moment he could sink his claws into the fabric of the universe and tear it wide open.

But he _won’t,_ thinks Liz, with joy. He's content here, on the floor in the light of the setting winter sun. The radiator humming. Lasagna in the oven. She rests her head on Jon’s shoulder. In her lap, Odie’s breathing steadies.

From his spot in the sun, the cat smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> something soft & spooky for the halloween season. i wrote this a year or so ago. also posting in honor of my dear friend nico who has always supported my garfield fanon... thank u king, and happy almost birthday. as always, kudos & comments appreciated.


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